General Multi Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) is today employed in Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) networks, Optical Transport Networks (OTN) and Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM) networks. In the medium term, General Multi Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) may enable Ethernet control plane based networks to be generalised by unifying Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Multi Protocol Label Switching Transport protocol (MPLS-TP) networks.
Recently, development of General Multi Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) network protocols has reached a level of maturity with regard to the protocol stack and the related control plane deployment. However, in the management plane, further work is required on the network monitoring functionality to ensure that the network responds in an appropriate and timely manner to changing network conditions.
The Link Management Protocol (LMP), deployed in a General Multi Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) network, is used to manage neighbouring network nodes. The Link management protocol uses the neighbouring node link information and it is used for both service provisioning and topology management. However, since the Link Management Protocol (LMP) implemented on any one network node does not have a full network view, the Link Management Protocol (LMP) implemented in the network nodes must be configured from a centralised system. In some General Multi Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) networks, the centralised system might be a Network Management system (NMS).
Traditionally, network management systems manage the network topology and the related Link Management Protocol (LMP) configuration by means of manual node installation, manual link creation and then configuration of the Link Management Protocol (LMP) for each network node of the manually setup link. This is a tedious and error prone approach.
The present invention seeks to alleviate at least some of the problems in the prior art, and to provide a new method of and apparatus for configuring a link in a label switching communication network.